My Granny Was A Prepper When Prepping Wasn’t Cool

By Peggy Sue, on April 13th, 2012

I realized today my grandmother was prepping way before prepping was cool. In fact, she was born a century before “prepper” was even a word. Lord rest her soul. If there’s a kitchen in heaven there’s no doubt she is up there right now either cooking, planning to cook, cleaning up after cooking or growing and canning something to be cooked at some point in the future.

But, back to prepping.

I remember asking her once how she fared during the Great Depression. She just laughed and made this tongue shushing sound. She had a knack for almost saying the word sh*t but she tended not to talk that way so it always got cut off somewhere between the vowel and the letter t. It always came out so prim and proper but we all knew what she meant so maybe in her own way that was being pretty bold. Anyway, she then went on to explain they “Wouldn’t have even knowed there was no depression if it weren’t for all them men coming out of the cities wanting work. And there’d be plenty a work except they all wanted cash money. You know green money. Something they could send back home in the mail to their wives or Moms or even kids. It was real sad watching how bad they needed to send something to their folks.”

Apparently the more common means of paying for odd jobs and extra labor was eggs, butter, maybe a quart of milk or even just a big slice of pie. A big job might garner a whole pie or an entire loaf of fresh baked bread. It might have even mattered what day of the week being that baking just about never took place on wash day and nobody would pay out in eggs on Sunday when there’d be a yard full of field hands expecting breakfast on Monday morning.

But however she experienced those hard times the good news for us today is this being prepared thing is really where we all came from in the first place. It’s not like we have to go out and build some new way of life from scratch. All we have to do is discover those memories of the grandchildren who talked to, listened to and most of all learned from the generation who weren’t prepping for anything when they did blaze the way from scratch. At least they didn’t call it prepping. They would have called it … surviving. And since we are all here alive and well, they apparently were pretty good at it.

Of course the next thing this newest generation also has to learn from we older citizens is the fact it does very little good to stock pile anything if it isn’t ORGANIZED well enough to be found when it is eventually needed. Bearing in mind that need might arise months if not years down the road from now. AND then too some system from the inventory-keeping type process of first in – first out so things don’t get out of date and spoiled before the occasion rolls around to actually use those stockpiled ingredients.

Ah well. I’m available for interviews on the subject if you want to know how my Granny did anything. Just sayin’ …

2 comments to My Granny Was A Prepper When Prepping Wasn’t Cool

A sweet and loving spirit, with a deep abiding love for her family. She was the glue that kept us all drawn to her and thus to one another.

An often quoted “Depression era” saying “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was surely one of Granny’s earliest lessons to her children and grand-children. I miss her like she left us yesterday….